He began by thanking the fishermen of Windover for their trust and their friendship. Both, he said, he valued, and more than they would ever know. Of his own struggles and troubles, of thebitter years that he had toiled among them, he said no word. He spoke of the kindness of Windover, not of its neglect. He spoke of the strength and the goodness of the city, rather than of its weakness and its error. He spoke of the warm heart of the people, of their readiness to help any need which they understood, and in whose claim they believed. He told how generous they were in emergencies. “You give money,” he said, “more lavishly than any town I have ever known. When the gales have struck, and the fleets gone down, and when, with widows and orphans starving on my heart and hands, I have asked for bread, Windover has never given them a stone. Your poor have spent themselves utterly upon your poorest, and your rich have not refused. Windover gives gloriously,” said Bayard, “and I am glad and proud to say so.”
Their faults, he told them, they had, and he was not there to condone what he had never overlooked. One, above the rest, they had to answer for; and what that was—did he need to name?
“It is not your sin alone,” he said firmly.“It is the sin of seaport towns; it is the sin of cities; it is the sin of New England; it is the sin of the Nation;—butit is the sin of Windover, and my business is with Windover sins. I have fought it since I came among you, without an hour’s wavering of purpose, and without an hour’s fear of the result; and at all costs, at any cost, I shall fight it till I go from you. For God has set me among you, not to minister to your self-satisfaction, but to your needs.”
Bayard paused here, and regarded his people with a long look. Their faces blurred before him for a moment, for his heart was full. He saw them all, in the distinctness with which the public speaker perceives familiar sights; every trifle upon the map of his audience started out.
He saw Captain Hap, anxious and wrinkled, doing usher’s duty by the door—Captain Hap, neither pious nor godless, but ready to live for the parson or to die for him, and caring little which; the good fellow, true with the allegiance of age and a loyal nature—dear Captain Hap!
Bayard saw Job Slip, pale with the chronic pallor of the reformed drunkard—poor Job, who drank not now, neither did he taste; but bore the thirst of his terrible desert, trusting in the minister and God Almighty,—in the succession of the phrase.
Mari was there, incapable and patient, her face and figure stamped with the indefinable something that marks the drunkard’s wife. And Joey, serious and old—little Joey! Bob was there, and Jean, and Tony, and all the familiar faces from the wharves. Mrs. Granite, in her rusty black, sat tearfully in a front settee, with Jane beside her. Jane looked at the minister, before all the people, as she never ventured to look at home. But nobodynoticed Jane. Bayard did but glance at her pinched, adoring face; he dared not dwell upon it.
Ben Trawl was not to be seen in the audience. But Lena was. She stood the service through, for she had come in too late to find a seat; she stood behind Johnny’s mother, who wore Helen’s crape bonnet and veil, poor old lady, with a brown bombazine dress. Lena had a worried look. She did not remove her eyes from the preacher. Lena sang that day, when the people started “the minister’s hymn,”—
“I need Thee every hour,Stay Thou near by.”
Her fine voice rose like a solo; it had a certain solitariness about it which was touching to hear.
“Temptations lose their powerWhen Thou art nigh.”
The melody of the hymn died away into the hush in which Bayard rose again, for it came to his heart to bless his people and his chapel in one of his rare prayers.
“Lord,” he said, “Thou art the God of the sea and its perils; of the land and its sorrow. Draw near to these sea-people who tread upon the shore of Thy mercy. I dedicate them to Thee. Father, take them from my hands! Lift them up! Hold them, that they fall not. Comfort their troubles. Forgive their sins. Take them! Take my people from my heart!... Lord, I consecrate thishouse of worship, for their sakes, and in Christ’s name, and for Christ’s love, to Thee, and to Thy service.... Father! Thou knowest how I have loved this people.”...
Bayard’s voice broke. It was the only time—in all those years. His prayer remained unfinished. The sobs of his people answered him; and his silence was his benediction upon them.
The audience moved out quietly. It was now dark. The lights in the chapel had been noiselessly lighted. The jets of the illuminated words above the door were blazing.
The Professor and the clergymen and Helen’s mother stepped apart and out into the street; none of them spoke to Bayard, for his look forbade them. The Professor of Theology was greatly moved. Signs of tears more natural than evangelical were on his aged face. Bayard, lingering but a moment, came down the aisle with his wife upon his arm.
“Love,” she whispered, “it is over, and all is well.”
“Yes,” he answered, smiling, “it is over, and it is well.”
They came down and out upon the steps. Bayard stood uncovered beneath the white and scarlet lights, which spelled the words,—
“The Love of Christ.”
He gave one glance down Angel Alley. It was packed; his people were massed to protect him.Beyond them, marshaled into the darkness and scarcely distinguishable from it, hovered certain sullen groups of frowning men. Not a hand was raised. Not a cry was heard. No. There was to be no mob. He had to meet, not violence, but mute and serried Hate.
She clung to his arm with a start. She looked up into his face. Its more than earthly radiance hushed the cry upon her lips. He was transfigured before her. For that moment, all the people—they who loved and they who loved him not—saw him glorified, there, beneath the sacred words whose pure and blazing fires seemed to them the symbol of his soul.
Then, from the darkest dark of Angel Alley a terrible oath split the air. Something struck him; and he fell.
Half a thousand men gave chase; but the assailant had escaped to the common shelter of the coasting town. He had taken to the water.
It was now quite dark; clouds had gathered; the wind had risen suddenly; thunder was heard. A fierce gust tore the dust of Angel Alley, and hurled it after the fleeing criminal; as if even the earth that he trod rejected him. In this blinding and suffocating whirlwind the pursuers stumbled over each other, and ran at haphazard. The police swept every skulking-place, dividing their forces between the Alley and the docks. But their man, who was shrewd enough, had evaded them; it was clear that he had marked out an intelligent map of escape, and had been able to follow it.
The baffled police, thinking at least to pacify the angry people behind them, kept up that appearance of energy, with that absence of expectation, for which their race is distinguished.
An officer who was stealthily studying the docks far to the westward, and alone, suddenly stopped. A cry for help reached him; and it was a woman’s cry. The voice kept up an interrupted iteration:—
“Police! Help!—Murder! Sergeant!—Help! Help!” as if choked off, or strangled in the intervals.
The sergeant, following the sound as well as he could, leaped down the long, empty wharf from whose direction the cry seemed to come, and peered over the slimy edge. The storm was passing noisily up the sky, and the darkness was of the deepest.
Out of its hollow a girl’s voice uprose:—
“Sergeant! Sergeant! He’s drowning me! But I’ve got him!” and bubbled away into silence.
At that moment there was lightning; and the outlines of two figures struggling in the water could be distinctly seen. These two persons were Lena and Ben Trawl. They seemed to have each other in a mutual death-grip. The girl’s hands were at the man’s throat. He dashed her under and under the water. But her clutch did not relax by a finger. He held her down. But Lena held on.
“After I’ve strangled you!” gasped Lena.
“—— you,” muttered the man. “Drown, then!”
Her head went under; her mouth filled; this time she could not struggle up; her ears rang; her brain burst. But the little fingers on the big throat clutched on. Then she felt herself caught from above—air came, and breath with it—and Ben swore faintly.
“Undo your hands, Lena,” said the sergeant.“We’ve got him. You don’t want to hang him before his time.”
Another flash of lightning revealed the sea and sky, the docks and the officers, and Ben, purple and breathing hard, stretched upon the wharf. Lena heard the snap of the handcuffs upon his wrists; and then she heard and saw no more.
The sergeant touched the girl’s dripping and unconscious figure with a respect never shown to Lena in Windover police circles before.
“She might not come to, yet,” he said; “she’s nigh enough to a drowned girl. Get a woman, can’t you, somebody?”
“The man’s all we can manage,” replied a brother officer. “Get him to the station the back way—here! Give a hand there! Quick! We’ll have lynch-law here in just about ten minutes, if you ain’t spry. Hark! D’ye hear that?”
A muffled roar came down the throat of Angel Alley. It grew, and approached. It was the cry of all Windover raging to avenge the Christian hero whom it learned, too late, to honor.
“Anyhow, he’ll hang for it,” muttered Lena, when she came to herself in her decent room. Johnny’s mother was moaning over her. Lena pushed the old woman gently away, and commanded the retreating officer,
“Say, won’t he? Out with it!”
“Well,” replied the officer in a comfortable tone,“a good deal depends. Liquor men ain’t skerce in this county. He’d get twenty witnesses to swear to an alibi as easy as he’d get one.”
“Let ’em swear,” said Lena. “I see him do it. I saw him heave the stone.”
“That might alter the case, and again it mightn’t,” replied the officer; “it would depend on the value of the testimony—previous reputation, and so on.”
Lena groaned.
“But I caught him by the arm! I stood alongside of him. I was watching for it. I thought I’d be able to stop him. I’m pretty strong. I grabbed him—but he flung me off and stamped on me. I see him heave the rock. See! There’s the mark, where he kicked me. Then he ran, and I after him. I can swear to it before earth and heaven. I see him fling that rock!”
“You see,” observed the officer, “it ain’t a case of manslaughter just yet. The minister was breathing when they moved him.”
They carried him to his own rooms, for it was not thought possible to move him further. He had not spoken nor stirred, but his pulse indicated that a good reserve of life remained in him. The wound was in the lung. The stone was a large and jagged one, with a cruel edge. It had struck with malignant power, and by one of those extraordinary aims which seem to be left for hate and chance to achieve.
His wife had caught him as he fell. She had uttered one cry; after that, her lips had opened only once, and only to say that she assented to herfather’s proposal for the removal of her husband to Mrs. Granite’s house, and that she entreated them to find some gentle method of transportation over the rough road. For Windover was a town of many churches, but of no hospital.
Oddly, the only quite coherent thought she had was of a man she had heard about, a carpenter, who fell from a staging on the other side of the Cape. He was put into an express cart and driven home, a seven-mile gallop, over the rudest road in the State, to his wife; naturally, he was dead when he got there. Bayard had been called to see the widow.
Captain Hap stepped up (on tiptoe, as if he had been in a sick-room), and whispered to the surgeon who had been summoned to Angel Alley.
“That will do,” said the surgeon; “it has never been tried, that I know of, but it is worth trying—most modern ideas are—if practicable.”
“The fishermen hev cleared the car, the company has cleared the track, and the motor man is one of his people,” said Captain Hap; “an’ there’s enough of us to carry him from here to heaven so—so lovin’ly he’d never feel a jolt.”
The old captain made no effort to wipe the tears which rained down his wrinkled cheeks. He and Job Slip, with Mr. Bond and Bob and Tony, took hold of the stretcher; they looked about, to choose, out of a hundred volunteers, the sixth strong hand.
The Reverend George Fenton, agitated and trembling,forced his way through the parting crowd, and pleaded piteously to be allowed to offer his assistance in carrying his wounded classmate.
“I have never lifted a hand to help him since I came to Windover,” cried Fenton in the voice of a man who would rather that the whole world heard what he said and knew how he felt. “Let me have this chance before it is too late!... I’m not worthy to touch his bier,” added Fenton brokenly.
They gave way to his pleading, and it was done as he asked. Thus the wounded man was carried gently to the electric car—“the people’s carriage.” The fishermen, as the captain said, had captured it; they stood with bowed heads, as the stretcher passed through them, like children, sobbing. Throngs of them followed the slowly moving car, which carried Bayard tenderly to his own door. It was said afterwards that scores of them watched all night outside the cottage, peering for some sign of how it fared with him; but they were so still that one might hardly tell their figures from the shadows of the night.
The wind had continued to rise, but the thunder had passed on, and the shower was almost over when Bayard’s bearers lifted him across the threshold of Mrs. Granite’s door. At that moment one belated flash ran over earth and sea and sky. It was a red flash, and a mighty one. By its crimson light the fishermen saw his face for that last instant; it lay turned over on the stretcherquietly, towards his wife. The red color dyed her bridal white, and the terrible composure of her attitude was revealed; her hand was fast in his; she seemed to communicate, God knew how, with the unconscious man.
The flash went out, and darkness fell again.
“Then God shut the door,” muttered an old and religious fisherman who stood weeping by the fence, among the larkspurs.
The wind went down, and the tide went out. Bayard’s pulse and breath fell with the sea, and the June dawn came. The tide came in, and the wind arose, and it was evening. Then he moaned, and turned, and it was made out that he tried to say, “Helen?—was Helen hurt?” Then the soul came into his eyes, and they saw her.
He did not sink away that day, nor the next, and the evening and the morning were the third day in the chamber where death and life made duel for him.
He suffered, it is hard to think how much; but the fine courage in his habit of living clung on. The injury was not, necessarily, a fatal one. The great consulting surgeon called from Boston said. “The patient may live.” He added: “But the vitality is low; it has been sapped to the roots. And the lung is weak. There has been a strain sometime; the organ has received a lesion.”
Then Job Slip, when he heard this, thought ofthe minister’s cough, which dated from that battle with the surf off Ragged Rock. And the value of his own cheap life, bought at a price so precious, overwhelmed the man. He would have died a hundred deaths for the pastor. Instead, he had to do the harder thing. It was asked of him to live, and to remember.
In all those days (they were eight in number) Jane Granite’s small, soft eyes took on a strange expression; it was not unlike that we see in a dog who is admitted to the presence of a sick or injured master. God was merciful to Jane. The pastor had come back. To live or to die, he had come. It was hers again to work, to watch, to run, to slave for him; she looked at the new wife without a pang of envy; she came or went under Helen’s orders; she poured out her heart in that last torrent of self-forgetful service, and thanked God for the precious chance, and asked no more. She had the spaniel suffering, but she had the spaniel happiness.
For seven days and nights he lay in his shabby rooms, a royal sufferer. The Christ above his bed looked down with solemn tenderness; in his moments of consciousness (but these were few) he glanced at the picture.
Helen had not left his room, either day or night. Leaning upon one arm on the edge of the narrow bed, she watched for the lifting of an eyelid, for the motion of a hand, for the ebbing or the risingof a breath. Sometimes he knew her, and seemed to try to say to her how comforting it was to him to have her there, in the dreary old rooms, where he had dreamed of her sumptuous presence; where they meant to begin their life and love together.
But he could not talk. She found herself already anticipating the habit of those whom the eternal silence bereaves, recalling every precious phrase that his lips had uttered in those last days; she repeated to herself the words which he had said to her on Sunday morning,—
“Nothingcanharm us now, for you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever.”
As the seventh day broke he grew perceptibly stronger. Helen yielded to her father’s entreaties, and for a moment absented herself from the sick-room—for she was greatly overworn,—to drink a breath of morning air. She sat down on the step in the front door of the cottage. She noticed the larkspur in the garden, blue and tall; bees were humming through it; the sound of the tide came up loudly; Jane Granite came and offered her something, she could not have said what; Helen tried to drink it, but pushed the cup away, and went hurriedly upstairs again.
A cot had now been moved in for her beside Bayard’s narrow bed. She sat down on the edge of it, between her father and her husband. The Professor stirred to step softly out.
“Dear Professor!” said Bayard suddenly. He looked at the Christ on the wall, and smiled.“We meant—the same thing—after all,” he whispered.
Then he put his hand in his wife’s, and slept.
It came on to be the evening of the eighth day. He had grown stronger all the day, but he suffered much.
“Folks are keepin’ of him back by their prayers,” said the religious, old fisherman, who leaned every day upon the garden fence. “He can’t pass.”
But Job Slip and Captain Hap, who sat upon the doorsteps, listening from dawn to dark for any sign from Bayard’s room, said nothing at all.
It came to be evening, and the tide had risen with the wind. The sea called all night long. Helen sat alone with her husband.
He did not wander that night, but watched her face whenever he was not asleep.
“Kiss me, Helen,” he sighed at midnight.
She stooped and kissed him, but her lips took the air from him, and he struggled for it.
“You poor, poor girl!” he said.
The wind went down, and the tide went out. The dawn came with the ebb. Bayard fell into a sleep so gentle that Helen’s heart leaped with hope. She stole out into the study. Captain Hap was there; his shoes were off; he stepped without noise. The sunrise made a rose-light in the rooms.
“It is real sleep,” breathed Helen. “Don’t wake him, Captain.”
But when the old sailor-nurse would have taken her place for the morning watch, she shook herhead. She went back and lay down on the cot beside her husband; he moved his hand, as if he groped for hers, and she was sorry that he had missed it for a moment.
“It shall not happen again,” she thought.
Then exhaustion and vigil overcame her, for she had watched for many nights; and thinking that she waked, she slept.
When she came to herself it was broad, bright day. Her hand had a strange feeling; when she tried, she could not move it, for he held it fast. There were people in the room,—her father, her mother, Captain Hap. She stirred a little, leaning towards her husband’s pillow.
“Dear, are you better this morning?”
But some one came up, and gently laid a hand upon her eyes.
Job Slip went down to the water, and it was dark. He walked apart, and took himself into that solitary place on the wharves which he remembered, where he had knelt in the rain, one night, and said, “God,” for Mr. Bayard.
A mackerel keg was there—the same one, perhaps; he overturned it, and sat down, and tried to understand. Job had not been able to understand since Mr. Bayard was hurt.
Thought came to him slowly, and with pain like that caused by the return of congested blood to its channels.
“He is dead,” said Job. “Lord A’mighty, he ain’t alive. Seems I couldn’t get it into my head. They’ve killed him. He’s goin’ to be buried.”
Job clenched his gnarled hands together, and shook them at the sky; then they dropped.
“Seems like shakin’ fists athim,” thought Job. “I ain’t a-goin’ to. S’posen he’s up yander. That’s the idee. Lord A’mighty, what do you mean by it? You didn’t stop to think of us reformed men, did you, when you let this happen?... For Christ’s sake. Amen,” added Job, under the impression that he had been giving utterance to a prayer.
“Mr. Bayard?” called Job aloud. He slipped off the keg and got upon his knees. As he changed his position, the fisherman vaguely noticed the headlight of the schooner on which he was to have taken his trip, that night. “There goes the Tilly E. Salt,” said Job, interrupting himself; “she’s got to weigh without me, this time. I’m guard of honor for the—the—I can’tsayit!” groaned Job. “It’s oncredible him bein’ in a—him put in a—Lord, he’s the livin’est man I ever set my eyes on; hecan’tdie!... Mr. Bayard?Mr. Bayard, sir?”
Job paused, as if he expected to be answered. The water dashed loudly against the old pier. The distant cry of the buoy came over the harbor. The splash of retreating oars sounded faintly somewhere, through the dark.
“He’s livin’ along,” said Job, after some thought. “He can’t get fur out of Angel Alley. He wouldn’t be happy. He’d miss us, someways; he’s so used to us; he’s hoverin’ in them hymn-toons and that gymnasium he set so much by. I’ll bet he is. He’s lingerin’ in us poor devils he’s spent three year makin’ men of.... He’s a-livin’here.”
Job struck his own broad breast, and then he struck it again. A shudder passed over his big frame; and then came the storm. He had not wept before, since Mr. Bayard died. The paroxysm wearied and weakened him, and it was the piteous fact that these were the next words which passed the lips of the half-healed drunkard.
“God A’mighty, if I only had a drink!”
Two hours afterwards, Job Slip came up the wharves; he came as he went, alone; he walked with a steady step; he held his head high in the dark. He whispered as he walked:—
“I didn’t—no, I didn’t do it.... Bein’ left so—I’ve alwers had you, sir, before, you know. It makes a sight o’ difference when a man hain’t anybody but God. He’s a kinder stranger. I didn’t know, one spell there—but I was goin’ under.... You won’t desert a fellar, will you—yander? I’ll do you credit, sir, see if I don’t. I won’t disgrace you, ——d if I will!”
At that moment Job shied suddenly, like a horse, clear from one side of the wharf to the other. He cried aloud,—
“Why, why, what’s here? What’s got me?” Fingers touched him, but they were of flesh; little fingers, but they were warm, and curled confidingly in Job’s big hand.
“Joey?You?Little Joey! Why, father’s sonny boy! You come just in the right time, Joey. I was kinder lonesome. I miss the minister. I ain’t—just feelin’ right.”
“Fa—ther,” said Joey pleasantly; “Marm said to find you, for she said she fought you’d need you little boy.”
“And so I do, my son, and so I do!” cried Job.
With Joey’s little fingers clasped in his, Jobwalked up Angel Alley, past the doors of the dens that were closed, and the doors that were open still; and if the ghost of the dear, dead minister had swept visibly before Job and Joey, no man could have tempted or disturbed them less.
In his own chapel, in Angel Alley, Bayard lay in state. It was such state as the kings of the earth might envy, and its warriors and its statesmen and its poets do not know. It was said that his was the happiest dead face that ever rebuked the sadness of the living; and the fairest that they who wept for him had ever seen. Death had not marred his noble beauty; and in death or life there was no comelier man. All the city thronged to show him reverence who had lived among them baffled, doubted, and sick at heart; and it appeared that those who had done the least for him then, would have done most for him now: the people of ease; the imitators; the conformers, and the church members who never questioned their own creeds or methods; the summer strangers playing at life upon the harbor coast, and visitors from a distance where the preacher had his fame.
But when these superior and respectable persons crowded to give their tardy tribute to him, they were told that there was no room for them in the chapel; nay, they could scarcely find footing in the dust of Angel Alley. For they were held back by the sacred rights of “nearest mourners”; and Bayard’s mourners claimed him. It was saidthat hundreds of sunburnt men had stood waiting in the street since midnight for the opening of the doors, and the chance to enter. Then, there had passed up the steps of Christlove Chapel the great mass of the neglected and the poor, the simple and the sodden and the heart-broken, and those who had no friends but only that one man; and God had taken him. The fishermen of Windover, and the poor girls, the widows of Windover, and her orphaned children, the homeless, foreign sailors, and the discontented laborers from the wharves poured in; and the press was great.
He lay among them regally, wrapped in his purple pall. And he and Helen knew that her bridal roses withered forever out of mortal sight upon his breast. But she had given him up at this last hour to his people; he was theirs, and they were his, and what they willed they did for him, and she did not gainsay them. They covered him with their wild flowers, after the fashion of the Cape; and clumsy sailors brought big, hothouse bouquets flaring on wires and splashed with tears, “to give the minister.” And his dead heart, like his living one, was found large enough to hold them all.
One poor girl brought no flowers to Bayard’s burial. Lena brought only sobs instead, and watered his pall with her tears, and hid her face, and passed on, with her hands before it.
Now, around the bier there stood a guard of honor strange to see; for it was chosen from theWindover drunkards whom the pastor had saved and cured. Among them, Job Slip stood proudly in command at the minister’s head: the piteous type of all that misery which Bayard had died to lessen, and of that forgotten manliness which he had lived to save.
There was no dirge sung at Christlove Chapel when he was borne from it. A girl’s voice from a darkened corner of the gallery started “the minister’s hymn,” but trembled, and broke quite down. So the fishermen took it up, and tried to sing,—
“I need thee every hour.”
But they, too, faltered, for they needed him too much; and in silence, trying not to sob, with bared, bowed heads they passed out gently (for his spirit was upon them), thinking to be better men.
One of the summer people, a stranger in the town, strolling on the beach that day, was attracted by an unusual and impressive sight upon the water, and asked what that extraordinary display of the signs of public mourning meant.
An Italian standing by, made answer,—
“The Christman is dead.”
He tried to explain further, but choked, and pointed seaward, and turned away.
For, from every main in the harbor, as far as eye could see, the flags of Windover floated at half-mast. The fishermen had done him this honor, reserved only for the great of the earth, and for their own dead mates; and most sacred for these last.
Table of Contents added.
Missing and incorrect punctuation, including inconsistent hyphenation, corrected.
Period spellings (e.g. idyl) retained.
“repied” changed to “replied” on page 386. (replied the Professor politely)